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sunday rerun

I was thinking about Julie today and her husband’s sudden death and I remembered a post I did on my old blog. I had a tattered copy laying around and it being a lazy Sunday afternoon and all I decided to rerun it. I did the neat old movieanimation on Mr. bookbabie’s photo at LunaPic.com, a fun online photo editor and animator…

On our way home from Whole Foods today, my husband and I saw an accident just minutes after it happened. A large SUV had run off the road, hit a ditch, and smashed into some trees. Several cars had already stopped to help but the police hadn’t yet arrived and we saw that someone had opened the driver-side door. Inside, a woman lay slumped and unmoving over the steering wheel. She had short blond hair like me and she was wearing a red coat with a fur collar. Maybe she was out running errands we said, or maybe she was on her way home from a holiday lunch. We tried to convince one another that she was “just” knocked out from the force of the airbag, that the front end of the car really didn’t look that bad.

As we drove, one, two, three police cars sped past us, lights flashing and sirens screaming. Then two ambulances and another police car passed us and we suddenly realized that she probably wasn’t alone in that big SUV, maybe she had a car full of friends – or children. As we opened the trunk at our house we could still hear the wail of sirens in the distance and I turned to my husband and said, “Every day when I hear you…” and that’s all I got out before the tears started and the words caught in my throat. But what I wanted to say was this, “Every day when I hear the door open and I hear your footsteps coming into the house, and I hear your tired voice call out ‘hello’, that’s the best part of my day, that’s the moment I would choose to have back one more time if anything ever happened to you.”

Such a touching sentiment…I feel the same way every day that I know my kids are ok and my husband calls from work and walks in the door at night.

When my son was in Iraq the panic would build every day that I did not get an IM or email from him…then I would get one and it was like the weight of the world off my heart and I would breathe a huge sigh of relief and cry tears of Joy that he was ok…but the next day the cycle would start again.

I witnessed a similar accident this time last year as I was going to pick my son up from school. Only I witnessed the woman in the oncoming lane slam into a piece of heavy equipment that was working on the side of the road. The heavy equipment spun completely around with the operator inside of it. She never even slowed down! I and several others pulled off and ran over to help them and call 911.

The man in the machinery was fine thank God! The woman was shook up but seemed otherwise ok…but she was so obviously plastered drunk! She ended up arrested. It was awful she could have easily killed that man in the backhoe front /end loader. He was very lucky, and she was a complete moron.

you;re right
it is starting to happen here too, that sense of valuing all of the things in daily life that seem dusty and easy to overlook (NOT that mr bookbaby is dusty… lol…) just mean the long term weaving of love through time.

I remember coming on a car accident similar to the one you describe right after it happened. I was with a car full of pre-med students and we all jumped out to help. When the paramedics came I held the woman’s head in my bare hands to keep her skull from scraping on the pavement. Finally they had her ready for transport and they Life-flighted her to a hospital. I saw her obituary in the local paper a few days later. I thought to myself how I had held her head in my hands during her last moments of life. I thought about how fragile life is, and how easily our spirits leave us.

Wow Kathie, I’m so glad you were there to be with that woman and honor her life and spirit during such a sad event. I never heard what happened Laurie, so I’m thinking they were okay. I would have probably read about it in the paper if there had been any fatalities.